Posts Tagged ‘racism’

Eric Alterman on conservatism, as exemplified by its most venerable organ, National Review:

[editorship of NR,] as founder and longtime editor William F. Buckley Jr. once explained, could only be filled by a “believing Christian.” All three [Jeff Jacoby, Jennifer Rubin, and Jonah Goldberg] are Jews and therefore disqualified by birth.
…
How ironic, therefore, that the man [Elliott Abrams] asking this question [how could Stalin have killed so many of his own people] worked tirelessly in the Reagan administration to ensure that Guatemala’s mass-murdering dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, could continue his genocidal campaigns…[not to mention Angola, South Africa, El Salvador, etc.]
…
you can also find a contribution from the armchair warrior Victor Davis Hanson insisting that opinion polls demonstrate that “outsider presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina may represent about half the country.”

And some great NR quotes:

“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race” (The Editors, 1957).

On Adolf Eichmann’s trial for genocide in Jerusalem: a “lurid
extravaganza” promoting “bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive,
the advancement of Communist aims, [and] the cultivation of pacifism”
(The Editors, 1961).

On AIDS victims: “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed
in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the
buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals” (Buckley,
1986).

[only available in print edition] On ending segregation: “[A] suddenly enfranchised, violently embittered Negro population… will take up the vote and wield it as an instrument of vengeance, shaking down the walls of Jericho even to their foundations, and reawakening the terrible genocidal antagonisms that scarred the Southern psyche during Reconstruction.” 1965

This is respectable conservatism. Modern conservatism is Stormfront and Trump.

Like this:

A Mankato police officer said he got a phone call about 1 a.m. Tuesday from an old high school friend.

The man on the other end of the line was Allen Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, who confessed that just two hours before he had shot five people at a protest outside the Minneapolis Police Department’s Fourth Precinct station, according to court documents.

…

He remains in the Hennepin County jail, along with Nathan Gustavsson, 21, of Hermantown, Minn., and Daniel Macey, 26, of Pine City, Minn., who turned themselves in. On Wednesday, police also announced the arrest of Joseph Martin Backman, 27, of Minneapolis, on suspicion of assault.

Do you know what a fluffer is? The clinical Wikipedia definition: “A fluffer is a person employed to keep a male adult film star aroused on the set. These duties, which do not necessarily involve touching the actors, are considered part of the makeup department. After setting up the desired angle, the director asks the actors to hold position and calls for the fluffer to ‘fluff’ the actors for the shot. Fluffing could also entail sexual acts such as fellatio or non-penetrative sex.” …

Fluffer is also the name of a 2001 gay porn film that got a buzz because Blondie (Debbie Harry) was in it. But it will have a whole new life now because so was Scott Gurney, the creator of Duck Dynasty.

Howie’s got clips at the link. They’re actually quite tasteful, all things considered. Mr Gurney played one of the leads by the name of Johnny Rebel. He’s quite attractive.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

(11) The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Need I point out that Derbyshire’s IQ maunderings are racist nonsense? Apparently I must, so here goes:

Myth: Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born English-speaking people in the United States. Culture bias in IQ tests does not explain the difference in black-white IQ scores, a difference of approximately 15 points between the means of group distributions.

Reality: The idea that all “native-born English-speaking people in the United States” develop and live in the same culture is anthropological nonsense. Cognitive performance is never independent of culture any more than the way language is used is independent of culture. Linguistic structure, in fact, controls the way people think and learn, so that if linguistic structure is culture dependent, so also is thinking and learning. As for cultural bias in IQ tests not explaining the difference in black-white IQ scores, there is no hard scientific evidence to support any such idea — and considerable evidence against it. The notorious black-white IQ gap of one standard deviation (about 15 points), touted by genetic determinists to be independent of culture, was in fact substantially reduced between 1972 and 2002 — and it continues to shrink.

Another thing conservatives like Derbyshire ignore — because to admit it would require them to back environmental regulations — is that concentrations of lead, which are still higher in the inner city than elsewhere because of the prevalence of older buildings with lead paint, are harmful to the human brain:

Some people assume that lead poisoning went away with the total ban on leaded gas in 1995, 23 years after its phaseout began and almost 50 years after lead was first added to gasoline as an antiknock agent. National health surveys in the 1970s had revealed high lead levels among children and adults but showed a 75-percent decrease by 1991. As the tide of childhood lead-poisoning ebbed, there were declarations of victory; a 1995 Atlantic Monthly article hailed America’s “triumph over lead.”

But lead poisoning remains the most significant environmental-health disease of children; it is especially prevalent among inner-city kids. Even though environmental lead levels caused by gasoline have dropped, lead poisoning is a pressing issue now because we’ve discovered much more about its capacity for human harm.

Children from all levels of society are at risk of lead poisoning, but those at the bottom, who are more apt to live in older, poorly maintained housing, are most often harmed. African-American children have 2 1/2 times the risk of white children, and Latino children about 1 1/2 times the risk, according to the CDC. Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, refers to this as the “ghettoization” of lead poisoning.

[…]

Lead can harm children before birth: It leaches from the bones of expectant mothers exposed during their own childhoods and crosses the placental barrier to enter the fetal brain. The May 2006 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives confirmed earlier findings that very low lead exposure during gestation may cause “lasting and possibly permanent effects” on a child’s cognitive development.

Retired detective and volunteer Maricopa County Sheriff’s Posse member [and buddy of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio] Mike Zullo is listed as the co-author of “A Question of Eligibility,” an e-book for sale through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

[…]

Zullo’s co-author is Jerome Corsi, a well-known political conspiracy writer.

Shortly after I finished reading this piece from the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake, in which he tries mightily to kill the idea that the truth (namely, that Romney lost the Iowa caucuses to Santorum) should be allowed to derail the effects of the reporting he and his Romney-fluffing buddies have produced on order from their bosses, I ran into this from Alec MacGillis in TNR:

Most of all, though, it seems odd to be chiding Santorum for playing to unpleasant racial dynamics when he spent several minutes early in the debate arguing on behalf of restoring voting rights to ex-convicts. It served the purpose of throwing Mitt Romney back on his heels for a few moments as he scrambled to compute what the proper answer was on this touchy issue, but it was also about as likely to win Santorum votes in the GOP South Carolina primary as cutting up the Confederate flag in front of the state Capitol for napkins….

[…]

For a Republican candidate to be talking like this when Republican state legislatures are doing their darndest to suppress black turnout, by non-convicted voters much less by felons, is a big deal.

Especially considering that Santorum brought up the subject because Mitt Romney’s superPAC was running an ad trying to Willie-Hortonize Santorum over Santorum’s vote for the Martin Luther King Bill.

We all were wondering how the Totally Not Racist members of the GOP’s Tea Party/Koch Bircher wing were going to react to the report — confirmed by Rice himself — that Sarah Palin and the very black former callege and pro basketball player Glen Rice had been going at it like minks almost right up to the point she married Todd Palin.

Now we know, thanks to TBogg, who reads Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest Robert Stacy McCain so we don’t have to:

Stacy gets all het up about this possibly because it occurred in the late eighties which means it probably was accompanied by a bow-chicka-wow-wow soundtrack (…as did all sex in those days, kids. Ask your parents. Over diner.):

What a pathetic travesty to see Joe McGinniss, who gained national fame for The Selling of the President, reduced to such a lurid and digusting (sic) excuse for “journalism.” What possible purpose could his claims serve, except as a vile personal smear on a Republican politician who is also a wife, mother and grandmother?

But wait…. What is wrong about a young single healthy white woman wanting to get her badunkadunk bonked?

Oh, I get it.

Stacy is afraid that Sarah’s commonsense conservative heartland, perfectly reasonable, don’t-have-a-racist-bone-in-their-bodies, nosiree bob, fan base might be put off their feed a touch by the image in their heads of a lithe young Sarah Palin grunting and heaving, her breasts swaying to an almost hypnotic jungle rhythm, as her white body is ravished while mounted reverse cowgirl style upon the massive black member of an almost Kenyan.

Hell, I’ll bet that Nathan’s — erm, Stacy’s — fantasy life has been immeasurably enriched thereby. To the point where he’s likely buying hand lotion (or Astroglide) by the truckload right now.

By the way: FDL’s invited Joe McGinniss, the author of the book wherein this and other revelations about Palin may be found, to a FDL Book Salon on September 25. Be there as he’ll be in the comments thread ready to take any and all questions.

Another day, another unearthed set of right-wing billionaires out to destroy the foundations of America.

You’ve heard of the Koch brothers, Charles and David, and their father Fred (who helped found and fund the John Birch Society). Now meet the family behind Amway, Blackwater (now Xe) and the decades-long plot — in the name of vouchers and “school choice” — to destroy free public education in the United States.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN’s polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

[…]

Trump probably won’t become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premises. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember – it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It’s simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says “the reason I got involved in public service” was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as “parasites” who must “perish”, and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: ‘The Virtue of Selfishness.‘

The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

This is why we’re suddenly seeing serious attacks on him from all quarters. If he’s allowed to stand, he gives away the corporate GOP platform as well as its reliance on the Southern Strategy.